Sunday, January 20, 2013

The trouble with tickets

The first of my posts from the 2013 Africa Cup of Nations in South Africa

The trouble with getting tickets for the 2013 edition of the
Africa Cup of Nations was twofold. Firstly, as someone not living in South
Africa, the only option was to buy them online. This in itself didn’t seem
problematic but the tricky thing was that no-one seemed to know where this
website was. When details of how to buy tickets in South Africa were released
back in October, all that was mentioned for overseas visitors was that details
would be forthcoming. Even the CAF website was strangely quiet. Knowing some
South African sports journalists, I turned to them for the information required
but even the people in the know didn’t know. Eventually, in December, word got
to me via Facebook that the site was now active. I tried multiple times to
order tickets online but the site kept crashing. Still, after some perseverance,
I managed to get tickets for the opening game and the final at Johannesburg’s
National Stadium.

The second problem was that on paying for the tickets, I
only received a voucher to collect them on arrival. Again, not a problem as
such until you realised that you could only pick them up from a small number of
Spar shops from around the country. This was a major design flaw, not only from
my perspective but for many South Africans. When ticket sales opened, some
complained that they could not find one of these stores to buy tickets, they
did not live near one and had no transport by which to get to one, or that the ticket machines were frequently offline. While there is a culture of leaving
buying tickets to the last minute within South African football supporters, the
ticketing process has undoubtedly contributed to vast numbers of tickets
remaining unsold by the beginning of the tournament. Two days before the
opening game, only one quarter of tickets for games at Durban’s Moses Mabhida stadium had reportedly been sold.

In spite of all this, I managed to locate one such Spar and
turned up six hours before kick off and found the ticket terminal. What I found
was a German report and cameraman filming the ticket collection process. As
tickets were being printed out, the camera went in for a close up of the
machine. As these tickets were being handed over to a customer, the cameraman
didn’t like the angle and so told the cashier to take them back and hand them
over again, but only when he was ready. So when I was next in the queue, the
reporter got excited that a couple of British tourists had travelled over for
the tournament and the microphone was pointed in my direction. After my
customary “um”, “er” and “ah”, it transpired that they were interested in the
ticketing issue. On being asked what I thought of it all, I answered that
despite the initial problems, it turned out to be straightforward. And it was.
I walked into the shop, showed my voucher and my ID and walked out with my
correct tickets. No problems, no fuss (apart from the TV people – they were
from ZDF, if anyone wants to find out whether I made it onto German
television).

And if you can look beyond the niggles that I was earlier
moaning about, the ticketing for the tournament has been far better this time
around than the World Cup in 2010. Not in terms of how to get tickets, but the
relative affordability for the wider South African football-supporting public. Although
FIFA’s flagship tournament had introduced the cheaper South African-only
category 4 tickets designed to allow the majority of the country’s football
support base (black, working class) the opportunity to be a part of the
tournament, the cheapest ticket priced at R140/ £10 (domestic matches cost R20/
£1.40) still priced many out of attending. Factor in the cost of transport, and
overpriced food and drink, a day out to a World Cup match was still beyond the
reach of many.

This time around, the organisers appear to have hit closer
to the mark. 2010 was more for the foreign tourists, but with tickets starting
at R50/ £3.50 for the group games, it maybe that 2013 is a tournament for South
Africans.

Hits since April 2010

Bio

As a long-suffering supporter of Tiverton Town FC, a former African sports researcher at the University of Edinburgh, and now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Johannesburg, this blog is some of my thoughts on the 'beautiful game' and its fans, from standing on the terraces on a cold weekday evening watching English non-league football to travelling the length of South Africa with soccer-crazed supporters, via Ghana, Togo, New Zealand, Canada, Scotland and wherever else I find myself.